‘. . . and our dear Channel Islands are also to be freed today.’
Winston Churchill, VE Day, 8 May 1945
EVERY YEAR DURING the Occupation, Adolf Hitler’s birthday on 20 April had been celebrated throughout the Reich with military parades, bands and speeches. In 1945, the German garrison on the Channel Islands was among the few corners of Hitler’s empire which still had the time and the inclination to mark the day. Bands played and choirs sang in the town squares as the Nazi flag was hoisted.
It was a depressing spectacle for the islanders. More than ten months had passed since D-Day, and the determination of the Germans to hold out to the bitter end had not diminished. On 28 February 1945 von Schmettow had been replaced as Befehlshaber by Vizeadmiral Friedrich Hüffmeier, a loyal Nazi, to ensure that the will to defend the islands did not falter. On 20 March Hüffmeier gathered hundreds of soldiers into the Forum cinema in St Helier, Jersey, to regale them with stirring speeches of loyalty to the Führer and the Fatherland. He told his troops that all fires were to be forbidden, in order to conserve fuel for the following winter; there was no end to the Occupation in sight. It seemed that only a full-scale Allied assault would dislodge the Germans.
Yet within a few weeks the inconceivable had happened. Late on 1 May, the islanders heard the news that Hitler was dead. Immediately, an intense sense of expectancy was aroused; it could only be a matter of days now before Germany surrendered and the islands were liberated. The armies of Germany were collapsing, the Russians were in the streets of Berlin and the Americans were fast moving to join up with their eastern ally on the Elbe. On 2 May Berlin fell, and on 7 May the general surrender of German forces was signed at General Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims in France.
The first week of May was a strange period of hiatus on the Channel Islands. German soldiers stood awkwardly by as shops openly sold Union Jacks. The demoralised, hungry German soldiers were bewildered, and the islanders took advantage of their crumbling authority by taunting them. Hüffmeier issued a proclamation on 5 May banning all demonstrations and meetings and ordered Alexander Coutanche, the Jersey Bailiff, to reinforce this with a statement of his own the following day. He complied: ‘I appeal to you all to maintain your calm and dignity in the days through which we are now passing.’
Jerseyman John Miere wrote a letter to his brother Joe, who was serving his prison sentence in St Helier for daubing swastikas on the walls of German billets, describing the feeling of anticipation on the island:
Dear Joe,
Great news is circulating around the town. Everyone seems to be going mad – long queues waiting outside of Laurens [a shop in St Helier] trying and fighting to buy UNION JACKS. I reckon that it will be over any minute now and I am sure waiting to see you out again – I am prepared to meet our troops with a super new American flag also a pretty large French and Belgian but I don’t seem to be able to get a Union Jack.
The B-?!!? Huns sure look down in the dumps – damn good job – they wanted this war and they’re sure getting it plus a bit extra for which they never bargained for.
Old Ma Robin the Bitch [a notorious collaborator] is scared to hell with the thought of the Great Führer pegging out – never mind she’ll have the runs after we’ve finished with her.
On 7 May the BBC announced that Victory in Europe Day – VE Day – would be celebrated the following day. Yet many of the islanders were very confused, as Jersey diarist Leslie Sinel noted: ‘Everyone got busy after the announcement that Victory-in-Europe Day would be tomorrow, but the position here is not clear as the Germans are still in occupation; there has been no slackening in warlike preparations on their part, for today new gun emplacements were being made in various parts of the Island . . . at night the Germans were at defence posts, guns were manned and searchlights swept the seas.’
VE Day dawned, and while the rest of Europe was celebrating the defeat of Nazism, the islanders were still waiting for Liberation. Coutanche announced – in a message agreed with the Germans – that the islanders could listen to Winston Churchill’s BBC broad-cast to the nation at 3 p.m., and asked them to refrain from demonstrations and to hoist no flags until after the Prime Minister had spoken. On Guernsey the Bailiff, Victor Carey, and the President of the Controlling Committee, John Leale, were told by the Germans at 10 a.m. that the war was over. The news was published in a one-sheet edition of the Guernsey Star.
Crowds gathered in St Helier and St Peter Port to listen to Churchill’s speech, relayed on loudspeakers: ‘Hostilities will end officially at one minute after midnight tonight, but in the interests of saving lives the “ceasefire” began yesterday to be sounded all along the front, and our dear Channel Islands are also to be freed today,’ he declared. There was ecstatic cheering. The islands were to be liberated, and finally, after five long years, Churchill himself had acknowledged them. Flags were hoisted and church bells rung.
The celebrations were a little premature. Two ships, HMS Bulldog and HMS Beagle, each carrying an advance party of twenty-two men, had left Plymouth at ten o’clock that morning, and were met at noon on the following day by Kapitänleutnant Armin Zimmerman, one of Hüffmeier’s aides, on a German minesweeping trawler. Despite the Reich’s unconditional surrender, Zimmerman had been instructed by Hüffmeier to seek terms for an armistice. Furthermore, Zimmerman warned that hostilities had not yet officially ceased, and that the British ships could be fired on by German coast guns. Hüffmeier’s intransigence only delayed the islands’ surrender until the next day, 9 May, when it was finally signed by his chief of staff General Major Heine on the quarterdeck of HMS Bulldog at 7.14 a.m., just outside St Peter Port. The same morning, Brigadier Alfred Snow, head of ‘Operation Nestegg’ to liberate the islands, transferred to HMS Beagle and sailed to Jersey, where he received the surrender of the island’s garrison at 10 a.m.
Alexander Coutanche immediately sent a radio message to the King assuring him of the loyalty of his Channel Island subjects: ‘We rejoice that we can once more take our place and play our part within Your Majesty’s Empire.’ He sent a second message to Winston Churchill, promising him undying gratitude for his inspired leadership, which had brought victory in Europe and the Liberation of the Channel Islands. The people of Jersey, he said, ‘will ever remember your affectionate reference to “our dear Channel Islands”’.
Sark was not liberated until 10 May, when three British officers arrived on the island and asked Sybil Hathaway, the Dame, if she would mind being left in charge of the 275 Germans on Sark until some troops could be spared; she remained in command until 17 May. Alderney was one of the last places in Europe to be liberated: on 16 May its three thousand-strong garrison was taken off to PoW camps in Britain.
After Churchill’s speech on 8 May, Jersey factory girl Stella Perkins remembers: ‘It was a crazy mood, absolutely crazy. People were suddenly bringing outlandish old radios out of hiding and putting them on their windowsills. There was loud music everywhere. Everybody was shouting and dancing.’ Cars and motorcycles hidden from the Germans for five years were unearthed from haystacks and barns. For the first time since the beginning of the Occupation, people could discuss the news openly in the street without fear of eavesdroppers. The curfew and the blackout were ignored as parties went on late into the night with the few bottles saved for this occasion.
In the following days, crowds gathered in St Helier and St Peter Port to greet the British troops as they began to stream off the landing craft with their vehicles and supplies. There was a happiness bordering on hysteria as islanders recognised friends and relations among the soldiers and hugged them in the street, weeping with delight. Leslie Sinel wrote on 12 May: ‘More and more men arrived all day, and these received a great welcome – everyone cheered, children clamoured for autographs, and the soldiers and sailors were very generous in showering chocolate, sweets and cigarettes on new-made friends. Many Jerseymen were in the [landing] parties and these received a special welcome, news of relatives on the mainland was sought by all.’
The photographs of the Liberation capture the intensity of emotion. Crowds of people lined the streets in their Sunday clothes, with ear-to-ear grins. The British soldiers had done nothing more than sail across the Channel, and they looked rather abashed as they were treated to a hero’s welcome.
Guernsey housewife Daphne Prins got her grandmother’s crinoline out of the attic and made a jacket out of a velvet curtain for the Liberation balls with the British officers. Twenty-year-old Jersey nurse Betty Thurban looked up from her work for virtually the first time in her working life and enjoyed herself: ‘At the Liberation, there were lots of dances – it was very exciting, meeting all these Englishmen whom you would never have dreamed of meeting. I married an officer in the Liberation Force and went back to England with him.’ She was one of many Liberation brides on the islands.
Eighteen-year-old Herbert Nichols was working at a Guernsey newspaper, the Star, and on Liberation day he worked round the clock to print the papers with the new orders. It was an exhausting and exhilarating twenty-four hours: ‘There were soldiers swarming all over St Peter Port. I brought home tins of food, tea and sugar that day. I traded a German dagger for five hundred Pall Mall cigarettes.’
For the thirty-six thousand German soldiers on the islands, their world had fallen apart. Leutnant Randolf Kugler stood at the window of a house in St Helier and watched the first British ships arrive:
An elderly man was standing next to me and he was crying his eyes out. He had already been through the First World War. I was drunk. The night before we heard about the surrender, we had gathered together all the alcohol we could find and drank it to kill off the pain, anger and frustration. We all got drunk. For a soldier’s heart, it was difficult to accept that the British ships were no longer to be shot at. I had shot down thirty planes in my career; it had become a sport, it was either them or us.
Seaman Willi Reiman: ‘When the war ended, my whole dream collapsed. Everything was finished; all my plans were over, and I thought we must start again.’ Immediately after the surrender, said Reiman, the starving soldiers stormed the army food stores. They could not believe their eyes when they found tins of pork stacked high. They ate so quickly that they became sick, as their stomachs were unused to such rich food.
Within a few days of Liberation, the first consignments of German prisoners of war were being loaded onto ships to be taken to Britain. Islanders gathered to watch them lining up to board the ships; many could not help but feel some sympathy for the soldiers. Even Kathleen Whitley, who had served seven months in Caen prison for painting V-signs, felt pity rather than triumph: ‘They looked so dejected and so bowed down, I felt sorry for them.’
Kapitän Willi Hagedorne said: ‘Islanders thanked me and said that I must understand that they were glad to have the Tommies back. Everyone was shaking Befehlshaber Admiral Hüffmeier’s hand and thanking him for his fair treatment of the islands.’
Many islanders raided deserted German billets for souvenirs such as helmets, rifles, belts and uniforms. The abandoned gun emplacements, tunnels, bunkers and batteries were a child’s dream. Having watched the Germans playing with these toys of war for five years, there was nothing now to stop the children from having their turn. Tragically, there were cases of children being badly injured in the days after the Liberation by mines or hand grenades. Herbert Nichols: ‘The islands were covered in guns and live ammunition. We had a month firing live rounds out to sea until the British cleared everything up. We used to throw hand grenades around the beach. Several children were badly hurt when they tried to tow a rubber dinghy which had been booby trapped.’
Over the next few months more than twenty thousand Germans were taken to PoW camps all over England, from Cornwall to Northumberland. Most of them had three years of imprisonment ahead of them, working on English farms, before they were allowed to return to Germany. Just over three thousand were kept back to help clear the thousands of mines and dismantle the anti-tank girders on the beaches and the paraphernalia of defence equipment which had accumulated on the islands. The task of clearing the mines on Jersey was immeasurably eased by the refusal of Leutnant Johannes Kegelman to destroy the mines maps prior to the Liberation.
The King and Queen visited Jersey and Guernsey on 7 June, and received a delighted welcome. The roads were lined with islanders waving home-made Union Jacks. For many who had listened to the King’s hesitant voice for the last five Christmas broadcasts over their crystal sets, it was a dream come true to glimpse the couple as they swept by in their car.
But the air of festivity struck a sharply discordant note with some islanders. Dolly Joanknecht was eight months pregnant by her German boyfriend, Willi. While everyone was celebrating, her mind was a tumult of anxiety and worries as she and Willi faced the possibility they would be separated for several years, and Dolly would have the burden of bringing up their child alone. Willi managed to stay on Guernsey for a year by volunteering for a clearing-up party, but contact was difficult, and at times impossible. Dolly remembered:
Immediately after Liberation, Willi came up the road to say goodbye to me, and a couple of people in our street ran out and gave him a food parcel of bread and jam. I said, ‘Let me hide you in the wardrobe, stay here.’ But he said he had to go, and I remember his footsteps going away.
What hurt me was that everyone was thrilled that the war was over, and they never took my feelings into account. I was lonely; Willi had gone. I was pleased because my mum, brothers and sisters were coming home. But I didn’t know what was going to happen. Willi wrote me these lovely letters – he was so romantic.
I had a friend who also had a German boyfriend, Hans, and the two Germans planned to come and visit us for a night. We went down to the town and sat on the steps by the harbour front to wait for them.fn1 We heard Willi and Hans paddling a small boat very quietly. Then we heard the British guard shout, ‘Stop! Come here!’ A British officer came out of the nearby Crown Hotel, and asked, ‘What’s going on here?’ in a very snooty accent. Willi replied that they were just going for a row, and the officer shouted at them that they must go back to the boat.
A couple of nights later in June 1945, just before I had the baby, I was asleep and I woke to hear footsteps. The door opened and there was Willi. I was so pleased to see him. He stayed the night and we made lots of plans. Hans and Willi had paddled over in a boat, and the plan was for them to meet up to go back before dawn. But when Willi got there, the boat had gone, so he came back to me. Several of the neighbours knew Willi was here, but no one let on. He stayed with me two days and we went down to the town where lots of people saw us and recognised Willi, but they never told on us. The next day I went down with him to the harbour to get him back on his boat. We couldn’t decide what to do. I said to Willi, ‘Come on,’ and I marched up to the British guard with my huge stomach out in front of me and I said, ‘Excuse me, guard, my husband is Dutch, and he wants to get on that boat.’
The guard said, ‘If he wants to get on that boat, what’s stopping him?’ When Willi had walked through the barbed wire, the guard said, ‘I knew he was German because someone just told me.’
I hadn’t seen Willi for several weeks when Aunty spotted him and rushed over to give him a huge kiss. The English officer barked out, ‘No fraternising!’
One night Hans went back to visit his girlfriend but Willi wouldn’t join him. He was caught and the girl was put in prison for harbouring him.
Dolly had her baby, a boy, whom she named Anthony – after Antonia, the Frenchwoman who had saved her life in prison in France.
I wrote to the British commandant on Guernsey asking if Willi could come and see his baby. I had a letter, I can’t remember the exact words, but it was something to do with the Geneva Convention and he just couldn’t allow it.
When Willi was moved to a boat for the PoWs in the harbour I used to visit him every day. I would hold Tony up to show Willi. We couldn’t talk because he was across a stretch of water. When Tony was just over two months, I took him up to Fort George where Willi was imprisoned then, and he held him for the first time.
Dolly and Willi’s relationship was to survive, but Liberation spelt an abrupt end to many a genuine love affair. The departing Germans often had no chance to say goodbye to girlfriends of three or four years’ standing, and hearts were left broken.
Willi Reiman remembered that many German soldiers disappeared from their camps to seek shelter with their island girlfriends. The German PoWs called it ‘cutting under’, an expression normally used of submarines when they disappeared beneath the water. British newspaper reports estimated that up to fifty Germans were being hidden by islanders. In June the Daily Mirror reported that a policeman who had noticed two girls carrying parcels every day had followed them and found two members of the Wehrmacht, whom he arrested. In a report to the British government on 30 May, Brigadier Snow cited as his main concern the problem of flushing out escaped Germans: ‘There are strong suspicions that . . . there are enemy personnel secreted amongst the islanders, and in the near future will arise the task, with the co-operation of the island governments and police forces, of combing the islands in a systematic search.’
Snow voiced his fear that the island governments might not be able to face the unpopularity of organising such a step, and said it would be deeply resented if the army undertook to search the islanders’ homes. In the event, either the Germans eventually gave themselves in, or they were found by the British army; there is no evidence that any managed to evade the PoW camps in the end.
If a German boyfriend could not get out of his camp, the alternative was for his girlfriend to go and visit him. Leutnant Randolf Kugler has a vivid memory of the days immediately after Liberation on Jersey:
We were rounded up and I was appointed as one of the guards for night duty. One night I heard an argument in the dormitory so I went to investigate. It was between the old men who wanted to sleep and the young men who had smuggled their girlfriends in. I settled it by telling all the young men and their girls to go into the next-door stables where there was nothing but straw to sleep on.
All sorts of civilians were coming in and out of the German camps, so the British gave the German guards their pistols back to keep the civilians out and enforce the ban on fraternisation.
Once the Germans were in prisoner of war camps in Britain, the chances of keeping in touch were small. Few island girls knew which camp their boyfriends were in, and any letters they did send were intercepted by Postal Censorship and destroyed.
Randolf Kugler lost contact with his girlfriend, Colette:
I had a serious relationship. We were still together after the surrender when I was a PoW. It eventually faded because it was so hard for us to communicate. No correspondence was allowed between the islands and the camps in Britain. To avoid this we used to send letters via Switzerland and use code words to avoid the censors.
Colette probably met someone else and I became unimportant. At the PoW camps we got Channel Island newspapers and we used to read the section of ‘family news’ with the birth announcements, which for nine months after we left was very long.
Postal Censorship, which intercepted the letters between the islands and German PoW camps, compiled a report on 133 letters written in the first few months after Liberation. They make poignant reading. The names of the islanders have been heavily obscured with black ink.
In August 1945 a Guernseywoman wrote to Leutnant Hans Taubert: ‘I do not know how to start this letter or if it will ever get to you . . . Your son has grown since you last saw him and now weighs sixteen pounds.’
Another island woman wrote of ‘little Koni who can walk with the aid of a chair’. Another wrote to a German PoW to ask if his feelings were still the same. A letter addressed to Heinrich Muller was full of gossip, and referred to several German friends:
I am pleased you have seen Hermann. Here we think of you every day and the promises we made which I shall always keep. I have not changed my mind, and never will . . . Please tell Horst to write and that his girl also keeps his promises . . . we send our greetings to you, and all the comrades . . . I hope to hear from Hermann – perhaps I will have a letter from him. Do you know Feldwebel Peter Huppertz? Violet sends her love and best greetings to him and Oberfeldwebel Bruno Amling Sanitaat, his girl sends love and greetings . . . Well, my dear Henry . . . Greetings to Staba Geffoiter Alfons Krauer from [censored name] with all her love. The ring is now smaller and I wear it now and for ever.
Several letters from islanders were written in German.
The German PoWs’ letters far outnumbered those of the islanders. They asked for news, sent best wishes; one wrote that he was ‘homesick’ for Jersey, another thanked ‘dearest’ for ‘your kindness all the time I spend [sic] in Guernsey’, and another wrote of his ‘wonderful time’ on Jersey. One letter from PoW Dr Walter Lorenz was accompanied by a note, presumably to the censors, from his British camp commandant: ‘He appears to be on friendly terms with various prominent residents in the Channel Islands.’
Most of the letters were marked ‘condemned’, and the War Office noted that they had been destroyed. Only the passages quoted in the censorship reports have survived. The War Office also compiled lists of those islanders who had written to German PoWs in June and July.
Dolly and Willi Joanknecht were lucky. Willi had managed to get hold of some British stamps, which he used to send letters secretly to Dolly from his PoW camp in Devon. In May 1947 twenty-two-year-old Dolly picked up two-year-old Tony and set off, with virtually no money, to join Willi. They were finally married in August of that year; the first Anglo–German marriage after the war, they were told. Willi was still a PoW and was not allowed to wear a shirt and tie; he attended the wedding in his overcoat. The next few years were a struggle. Dolly found a job near Willi, and the toddler Tony spent half his time in the PoW camp. In 1948 the young family tried to return to Guernsey, but Willi was refused a work permit – this policy was subsequently relaxed for other Germans married to islanders. More babies arrived in quick succession and Dolly and Willi did not have the money to go to Germany. It was not until 1967, nearly thirty years after he had left his home, that Willi returned to visit his family. He was the only boy in his street to have survived the war.
Another Jersey girl, Pearl, was as determined as Dolly to be reunited with her German fiancé. It took her two years to find him. He had not had time to say goodbye and she did not know to which PoW camp he had been sent. She applied to all the authorities, but no one would tell her how she could trace him or where to send letters. She did not hear a word from him, but ‘there was no question that he would not want a letter from me, no question of that at all. That was one thing I was sure about.’ In the end the Quakers helped her find him. After he was released they were married, and Pearl accompanied him back to Germany, where she has lived ever since. In Pearl’s view, the Occupation was not a difficult time. Life was quiet, and her relationship with her German boyfriend was no cause for comment. It was only after Liberation, she said, that her whole world was turned upside down.
Dolly and Pearl required remarkable perseverance not only to find their boyfriends, but to stick with them through the difficulties which followed the war. Pearl had chosen to live in Germany, a foreign country which, in the immediate aftermath of the war, was painfully rebuilding its shattered economy. It was a hard struggle to start a life for herself and her husband; now after more than forty years, she has grown so accustomed to her adopted country that she stumbles to remember her English.
After Liberation, women who had fallen in love with Germans had to face open condemnation for the first time. Hatred and resentment against fraternisers, which islanders had hidden for fear of the Germans, now broke out into the open. Even harsher were the judgements of the British press and the islanders who had been evacuated to Britain during the war. Five years of wartime propaganda had maintained that fraternising was un-British behaviour. Islanders returned from having served in the British forces – husbands, brothers and fathers – to find illegitimate children fathered by Germans in their families, and joined the chorus of condemnation and rumours. For the first time girls like Dolly Joanknecht were forced to feel bitterly ashamed of what they had done. Dolly remembers seeing the word ‘jerrybag’ in a British newspaper:
When I first saw that word I felt dirty, as if I’d done something wrong – and I knew I hadn’t. Nobody had ever called me a jerrybag before, nobody.
Willi had written my mother a letter in very broken English saying how much he loved me and that he would never forsake me. She was touched and kept the letter all her life. My brother Georgie, who had been in the forces, never criticised me for having fallen in love with a German. But my brother-in-law was different; he had been in the British Navy. One evening he came to where I was living with my mother after I’d had my baby, and he said to me, ‘I’ve decided you’re not having this baby. I’m taking it.’ He grabbed Tony. ‘You can’t do that,’ I cried. ‘I can. You’re not worthy of him.’ I grabbed Tony and ran up to my aunt’s.
I lost one friend because of Willi. Sylvia had been my best friend. We had been very close from when we were tiny right up to the day of evacuation. We used to sleep together and do everything together. When she came back from Britain, she completely ignored me. I thought, well, if that is the way she wants it . . . but in fact I really wanted to talk to her.
Dolly Joanknecht was fortunate; the few harsh words she experienced were little in comparison with the humiliation and violence that some women on Jersey experienced immediately after Liberation. The Home Office had briefed the Liberation Force that there could be violence against female fraternisers. In 1944 the future Lieutenant Governors of the islands were told: ‘The relationship between German soldiers and some island women was of such a nature as to be a potential menace to future public order.’
Military intelligence summaries of interviews with escapee islanders in 1944 had reported that they believed ‘feeling in the island [Jersey] is so strong that the girls will find that certain groups of people will probably round them up, shave their heads and treat them as similar girls have been treated in France’. British soldiers had to intervene on a number of occasions to protect women. On one occasion they rescued a girl who had been thrown into the harbour in St Helier by a mob; the Jersey police had failed to intervene. Joe Miere was in a street in St Helier with some of his friends a few days after Liberation:
There was a gang with a flag singing and they grabbed a girl. We told them to pack it in. They called us ‘Jerryites’ but none of them had done anything during the war to resist the Germans. Then this girl came running past us with blood pouring from her head; she was as naked as the day she was born with blood streaming from where the scissors must have dug in. She was shivering and hysterical so I gave her my old raincoat to cover her up. I never did get it back.
Jersey factory girl Stella Perkins joined other rebellious teenagers daubing swastikas on the houses of women she had seen fraternising with Germans in the last months of the Occupation, but her attitude changed when she watched a horrifying spectacle from the window of her home shortly after Liberation:
This poor soul had been described as a jerrybag, and I saw her being chased by this mob of people. She was in a terrible state. She was running and crying and falling, getting up, and crying and running, and screaming and falling again. She disappeared out of my view down the hill, and all these people went after her. I never knew what happened to her, but I began to have after-thoughts about what I’d done, putting swastikas on people’s homes. I began to think, well, perhaps the woman was just short of money, or needed someone to love her, and she’s only a woman after all.
Jersey boy Maurice Green was in hospital when a girl who had had a baby by a German was brought in after having been covered in a tar-like substance and feathered. He claims he knew of another girl who was nailed to a tree by her hands; she survived and later married her German boyfriend. Another girl had a rag doused in petrol stuffed between her legs.
Leutnant Johannes Kegelman was imprisoned in the Pomme d’Or hotel in St Helier, and saw a girl being attacked by a mob: ‘I saw someone whom I think was a girl being attacked. There was a crowd around her shouting “Jerrybag, jerrybag.” They were hitting her and when the girl ran, the crowd chased her.’
Jersey farmer’s daughter Dorothy Blackwell saw how a girl was treated after she had been caught giving cigarettes to some German PoWs. Her hair was cut off and her jumper was hung on the barbed wire fence around the PoW camp. She said of the girl’s treatment: ‘I don’t think it worried us at all.’
On 15 May, a week after VE Day, The Times and the Daily Mirror reported that eight hundred Jerseywomen had had children by German soldiers. The reports pointed out that under Jersey law, if the mothers were married their husbands had a legal responsibility for the child’s maintenance, regardless of whether or not they had fathered it, and there was no divorce law. The papers raised the prospect of returning British servicemen being saddled with the legal responsibility of bringing up German-fathered babies. ‘The English papers . . . were quite nauseating on the subject and lowered the opinion of the British press held by this small part of the Empire in no uncertain fashion,’ commented the Liberation Force’s Civil Affairs Unit in a report to the Home Office.
It provoked real antagonism amongst islanders when girls who had been having affairs with Germans effortlessly switched their attentions to British soldiers. Jersey girl Mary McCarthy bumped into a friend who had been closely associated with two of the top German officers. ‘A month after the war ended, she was out riding with a British officer. I said to him, “Do you know she’s the biggest jerrybag?” He said, “Shut your bloody mouth.” I was furious. I nearly pushed him off his horse. Being patriotic doesn’t pay.’
It was not only women who were the targets of an upsurge of anger in the months before and after Liberation. All those who had collaborated – or were suspected of collaborating – with the Germans, particularly on Jersey, found themselves the object of violent attacks. Maurice Green remembers that the shop windows of a stamp dealer who had a German wife were smashed. Jersey teenager Joe Miere threw a home-made bomb through the windows of a shop belonging to a family who had entertained ‘the worst kind of Germans – rough Organisation Todt types with swastika armbands’.
Many companies dismissed workers who had been employed by the Germans and girls who had fraternised, and the Jersey Attorney-General said that the States could dismiss employees on such grounds if they saw fit. One court case reflected official attitudes; a man who had worked for the Germans had been insulted, but he was told by the magistrate that ‘no one was forced to work for the Germans; no true Britisher would work for them’. The island authorities were playing a different tune now.
Questions still hang over the disappearance of many well-known collaborators and informers from Jersey in the month after Liberation. It is rumoured that about fifty of the island’s worst collaborators were taken to England in a secret operation organised by British intelligence in a bid to defuse public unrest. Joe Miere: ‘The British took a shipload of collaborators to England. I only discovered last year [1992] what happened to them. They were released in Britain. They were an embarrassment to the British government. The daughter of one of those who had been taken off the island came and told me.’
Islanders remember that passages to England were strictly controlled. Mary McCarthy and her new husband were trying to get a boat to England for their honeymoon at the time and were refused permission, but several of her contemporaries managed to leave for England in those weeks.
There is no surviving documentary evidence to substantiate these stories, but considering how worried the Liberation Force commander, Brigadier Snow, was by the disquiet on Jersey, such an operation is not unlikely.
A number of families on Jersey fled to the local prison for their protection. The case of the infamous ‘Mimi the spy’, Mme Baudains, was reported in the Jersey Evening Post: ‘On the day after the Liberation of the Island by the British Forces, Mrs Baudains, generally alleged to be Jersey’s No. 1 Collaborator, went to the Police Station with her son and asked to be locked up for her own safety.’ She and her son were held in Jersey prison until a convent on the island braved considerable criticism to shelter her. On 23 March 1946 they were put on a boat for England. The Jersey Evening Post reported: ‘In order to avoid demonstrations of any kind, arrangements for her departure were kept a close secret and there were very few present on the Albert Pier at 6.15 a.m. . . . Mrs Baudains cast anxious looks out of the windows of the van and her relief was evident as she beheld so few present . . . Thus passed from Jersey a character for whose departure the Islanders will have no regrets.’
Those collaborators who remained on the islands astonished islanders with their sang-froid as they queued alongside everyone else at the bank to change their wartime black-market profits from Reichsmarks to sterling. The British government had set a generous exchange rate of 9.36 Reichsmarks to the pound for the islands as a step towards rehabilitating their economies; everywhere else in Europe, the Reichsmark’s value had collapsed along with the Reich. It angered islanders that there seemed to be no attempt to limit the amount of money people were changing, or to make a note of those who had unusually large amounts. Farmers were carrying tomato crates and potato barrels full of Reichsmarks to the banks. One Jersey bank clerk, outraged by the bags stuffed with German money that certain islanders who had traded with the Germans were asking him to change, drew up a list of their names. His sister remembers: ‘He was told by one of the Liberation Force officers to tear the list up because Churchill had said that the British Empire was not to know about things like that.’
Collaborators and black marketeers appeared to be escaping the justice which islanders had waited five years to see dealt to them. On Guernsey, the people confined themselves to grumbling, but on Jersey the pent-up anger found an outlet in violence, and fuelled several protest and reform organisations.
One such organisation was the Jersey Loyalists, who were formed to press for a court of inquiry to investigate collaborators and black marketeers and for the public condemnation of fraternisers – the latter were judged ‘so affected in health and perverted in mind by enemy propaganda as to render them dangerous to be allowed to mix with male British’. It counted among its members many army veterans and respected members of Jersey society.
The question of what was or was not collaboration had become a source of bitter dispute, and the Jersey Loyalists sought to clarify the matter in a petition to the Bailiff and the States of Jersey on 21 June 1945 which laid down what constituted ‘acts of disloyalty or treason.’ It included:
According to these definitions of collaboration, a large proportion of the islanders would have been guilty. Not surprisingly, the Jersey Loyalists’ demand for a court of inquiry which would investigate cases and publish its findings was rejected. The Loyalists had envisaged publication of the victims’ collaboration, and their resultant social ostracism, as punishment. The States set up its own secret committee of inquiry, but its decision to take no action did not satisfy the Loyalists, who were still trying to get their court of inquiry in March 1946.
Jersey clerk Arthur Kent was one of those who had begun organising to bring the guilty to justice before Liberation:
We tried to get evidence of people who were collaborating so that in the euphoria of Liberation these people would not be forgotten. When Liberation came, I was given the job of writing to the local newspaper denouncing people. There was one person who threatened a libel action, but it never came to that. One day, I got a letter which contained a revolver bullet and a letter in German. I took the letter to a friend who was in military intelligence; it was a threat against my life unless I stopped denouncing people.
The feeling against collaborators also fuelled the left-leaning Jersey Democratic Movement (JDM), which argued that the maladministration of the Occupation, and the fact that collaborators were not being investigated, was evidence of the need for far-reaching constitutional reform. On 18 June the JDM held an open-air meeting attended by two thousand people, and sent a resolution to the Bailiff demanding increases in the wages of the working classes. This was followed by another meeting on 1 August at which a resolution was drafted demanding drastic and immediate constitutional changes; a petition was presented criticising the island’s electoral law. fn2 Brigadier Snow, Commander of the Liberation Force, was perturbed by the agitation on Jersey, and sent reports to the War Office throughout the summer of 1945 urging that no troops be withdrawn from the island in case they were needed to deal with unrest:
There is considerable evidence that amongst the population that remained [during the Occupation] . . . there is growing discontent with the previous somewhat archaic and undemocratic form of government on the islands. Having experienced a more modern form of government in the UK . . . it appears that the returning evacuees may well add to the numbers of those who are not content with the islands’ form of government. This unpopularity [could] produce a situation in which the civil government is paralysed, even temporarily, as for instance a general strike.
Feelings were running high. Fantastic rumours, accusations and allegations were being bandied about. For many years, people had not dared to talk. Now their tongues were loosened, and the stored-up resentment against those who had done well out of the Occupation was released. It was particularly embarrassing for the Liberation Force and the Home Office, who could not be seen to treat the islands differently, that there was significantly more unrest on Jersey than on Guernsey, which was curiously calm. Perhaps this was in part attributable to Guernsey’s more deferential, traditional culture, which lacked the dissidents needed to provide leadership for protest movements.
Into this maelstrom returned the evacuees from Britain, the deportees from German internment camps and the former servicemen from the British Forces. Many of them were horrified to find their homes stripped of all their belongings – even doors, banisters and floorboards had been ripped out for firewood. Their furniture, they were outraged to see, was in the living rooms of their neighbours. James Ryan returned to Guernsey from serving in the forces to find: ‘The islanders who stayed behind had got all the best jobs, and they just didn’t want to know about us. They’d been on the other side.’
On Alderney, Daphne Pope and her family, who had remained on the islands, were viewed with suspicion by returning islanders: ‘They disliked us. They had been told to go to England, or they would lose their lives. So they left their properties, suffered all sorts of misfortunes, and when they got back they found their property in ruins. The only houses which were all right were the ones where the civilians had remained. And there we were, alive and healthy. The ones who went called the ones who stayed collaborators, and the ones who stayed called the ones who went cowards.’
Jersey teenager Bernard Hassall: ‘After the war, civilians came back, asking, “Where is my furniture? I left my house locked up.” Whatever we had done for them, they weren’t thankful. The claws came out: what happened to this or that? they wanted to know. To me, the evacuees were a pack of aliens; they criticised everything. There was a lot of quick condemnation on the islands and it was impossible to clear one’s name. The division between those who had been evacuated and those who stayed went on for a while.’
The Sherwill family was reunited: Ambrose Sherwill was repatriated from the German internment camp in June 1945, and the three eldest children came back from England, where they had served in the forces. Rollo, his older brother Jolyon and their mother May had remained on Guernsey throughout the Occupation. Rollo: ‘During the war we were always battling for something, for some food which might become available or for some other advantage. When my brothers and sister came back at the end of the war, they thought we were little brats who didn’t know anything. There was a gap – a lack of communication. People who came back after the war were totally critical of those who had stayed behind. It was understandable; they had been fighting the enemy we had been fraternising with.’
Reporters from the major British newspapers accompanied the Liberation Force onto the islands. Initially, the press saw the Liberation as an occasion for stirring editorials celebrating the fruits of victory. (On 7 May 1945, without even the grace of an intervening edition, the Guernsey Evening Press switched from trumpeting Germany’s victories and predicting Britain’s inevitable and imminent collapse to celebrating the end of the Occupation and offering elaborate expressions of thanks and loyalty to the Crown and Winston Churchill.) But as the days went by, the reports turned disturbingly sour.
The Times marked the islands’ Liberation with an editorial which encompassed every point of contention and took a delicately conciliatory line: ‘The islands have suffered greatly, but they have not been turned into battlefields and their freedom has been restored without bloodshed. The police tyranny of the years of occupation has left behind it bitter memories . . . and hunger. Because those who left have taken their full part in the war, because those who remained endured and kept their hope, the liberation of the islands is one of the sweetest fruits of victory.’
The Times and the Manchester Guardian carefully avoided any references to collaboration, and emphasised the suffering of the islanders, but they did report on 19 May that an investigation had been set up into the murder of 1000–1200 Russians and Jews on Alderney. They interviewed Daphne Pope’s husband George, who showed them ‘a secret chronicle which he said recorded over a thousand deaths’.
The popular newspapers reported the growing unrest, and the collaboration and black marketeering which had provoked it, in more detail. On 14 May the Daily Express talked of ‘an ugly black market which was run by collaborators who are now being rounded up’, and quoted black-market prices of £3 for an ounce of homemade tobacco and £50 for a ton of wood. It continued:
Many collaborators need to be found. One called Pierre Laval, a rich farmer, is still being searched for by the police and military. Another is an Englishwoman who stamped on a Union Jack in public. About twelve women on Jersey have been dealt with by the people. One was thrown in the harbour, others were tied to railings. Swastikas were painted on some of the houses with the names of the women underneath. Yet most of the population of Jersey put up a tremendous fight against the Nazis even when rations were low.
On 15 May the Express reported on Jersey’s resistance movement, which had been planning an insurrection since the beginning of the month, and which had a secret headquarters stocked with weapons and canoes. On 11 June the Express reported a clampdown on black marketeers (it was by then too late, since islanders had been allowed to change Reichsmarks into sterling between 16 and 23 May), with laws restricting the amount of money which could be sent out of the island and proposals for an Excess Profits Tax of 80 per cent: ‘One man who is said to have made £50,000 out of the occupation is now having to account for all his income and expenditure.’ The report went on to say that there was considerable confusion about the tax.
On 24 July the Express asked: ‘How are we going to prove to the men and women of the Channel Islands that it is better to live under loyalty to Britain than under occupation to Hitler and the Nazis when islanders were paid such good wages by the Germans?’ The paper went on to claim that seven out of ten islanders had refused to take jobs with the Germans, adding that ‘fathers of two or more children who worked for the Germans are exempt from criticism, as the choice was too much – a choice of working for the Germans, or seeing their children die’.
The Express also commented that the black market had changed the islands’ social structure: a farm labourer who had a patch of land to cultivate was wealthier with his half-sack of potatoes than the richest tax exile millionaire.
On 15 May the Daily Herald reported the story of Lucille Schwab and Suzanne Malherbe, who had been arrested in July 1944 and sentenced to death for urging German soldiers to mutiny. The story satisfied British readers’ appetites for tales of brave resistance against the Germans, but thereafter the Herald’s coverage changed. On 7 June it reported: ‘In Jersey there is a lack of interest on the part of the authorities in those islanders who worked with Nazis who informed against loyal subjects, and who got people sent to concentration camps, and who have more money in their pockets due to collaboration. Several underground organisations such as the Jersey Loyalists and the Jersey Auxiliary Legion have banded together and are planning to petition the States arguing for a special tribunal to be set up without delay.’
By July, the Herald was predicting riots: ‘Many believe that but for the military, there would already have been open revolt. [There is] grave concern about what will happen when the military go.’ The paper ran a sequence of stories on the growing pressure for political reform and justice for informers, commenting: ‘In the early days of liberation, many demanded that all collaborators should be punished. Yet now, feeling has crystallised against informers whose activities resulted in people being punished, deported and losing their lives, and black marketeers.’
Under the headline ‘Collaborators Get Off Scot-Free’ the Herald wrote: ‘Indignation is as high against collaborators in the Channel Islands as it is in the rest of occupied Europe . . . Some of the cases were as bad as anything brought to my notice in France, Belgium or Holland.’
The most critical reports were in the Communist paper the Daily Worker. One headline ran: ‘Did or Did Not the Administration Select Men for Deportation to Germany? Did They Not Put Anti-Semitic Laws on the Statute Books of the Islands? We Have a Right to Know’.
On 13 July, the Daily Worker revealed that Jersey people had assisted the Germans in deporting Jews, and demanded: ‘Is this conduct to go down in the history books unrebuked as a sample of the behaviour that should be observed when British territory is occupied by an enemy?’
‘War Office Whitewashes Jersey Authorities’, ran the headline of an article reporting that a large number of islanders had worked for the Germans and covering the emergence of the Jersey Democratic Movement. An editorial two months after Liberation said: ‘Those whose slogan during the Occupation was, “don’t do anything to annoy the Germans” are still holding the same positions in high office, yet these collaborators discouraged resistance such as V-signs.’
Stung by these comments, the Ministry of Information issued a statement on behalf of the War Office on 19 July, saying that collaboration was ‘almost impossible to avoid’ and dismissing the majority of allegations as mere rumour. It declared: ‘The Civil Affairs Unit [of the Liberation Force] is only concerned with those against whom it is possible that a charge of treason or treachery could be brought. Public safety officers of the Civil Affairs Unit are, in close association with local police, sorting out the very few solid facts from the froth of gossip.’
There was another story of Liberation which was very different from the mixture of elation and thirst for justice which characterised the islanders’ experience. The freeing of many of the islands’ slave labourers proved a far more painful and protracted process.
By D-Day, 6 June 1944, most of the labourers had already been moved from the islands back to France after the bulk of the fortification work had been completed. Shortly after D-Day, SS Baubrigade I and most of the remaining OT workers were evacuated to work on sites in Belgium. A few hundred Russians, Ukrainians, North Africans and Spanish Republicans were left on the islands after all shipping links with the Continent had been severed, and they remained there until they were liberated by the British in May 1945. Most of the Spanish Republicans were sent back to France, although a few stayed on the islands and married local women. The Eastern Europeans were taken to a PoW camp near Guildford, from where they were eventually repatriated either by boat from Liverpool or by train across Europe.
By 1943 Georgi Kondakov, Kirill Nevrov, Ivan Kalganov, Alexei Ikonnikov and Albert Pothugine found themselves in French labour camps, where conditions were significantly better than they had been on Alderney. In the weeks preceding D-Day Allied bombing raids on France intensified, and in the course of the bombing many of the forced labourers were able to escape from their camps.
Escaped Russian slave labourers stayed together in small groups. Understanding neither the language nor the country, the France they describe was a bewildering place. The Vichy government’s authority was crumbling and everywhere there was the chaos of war. Bands of outlaws, bandits and resistance fighters lived a hand-to-mouth existence in the burnt-out cellars of half-abandoned bombed towns. The Russians’ primary purpose was to find, beg or steal food. They found themselves on the fringes of the French resistance, and were sometimes caught up in sabotage and ambushes in what Kondakov described as ‘a mad, stupid war of a revolver and a few hand grenades against tanks’. But, he added, ‘we were in high spirits and could have sacrificed anything for victory’. These young Russians had nothing to lose.
Kondakov subsequently joined the Forces Françaises de l’Interieur and fought to liberate the town of Pierrefitte in northern France, while his friend Kirill Nevrov found himself the pampered secret guest of wealthy Parisian Russian émigrés. Nevrov remembers:
After Alderney I was moved to a camp near Cherbourg. In 1943, a friend stole something and hid it in my suitcase and I was caught. I was tried and sentenced to six months in a concentration camp near Metz, where I spent three months working on the Maginot Line. One day I was at Nancy railway station in a consignment of prisoners on our way to work when two trains came into the station at one platform, and the civilians got mixed up with the prisoners. Suddenly I felt someone throw a coat over my striped clothes and push me under a carriage. The stranger, who was a Frenchman, and I crawled under the train and up onto the other side of the station, where we jumped into the first train. The man hid me under a bench; I had no idea what was going on. When he lit a cigarette, I could see his hands shaking. Eighty kilometres later, a woman got on, and I heard her talk to the man about a ‘Russe Sovietique’. When we arrived in Paris they took me to the boiler-room of the station, and found me one of the boilermen’s overalls to wear. The woman then took me to a flat.
After a few weeks, Nevrov was moved to the home of a Russian émigré named Alexander and his French wife Marie José. For about a year, the couple hid Nevrov in their five-storey house in German-occupied Paris. They insisted he learn French and how to use cutlery properly. He drank fine wines, and was told that only horses drink water. As well as their Parisian house, the couple had a country estate. They provided Nevrov with more clothes than he had ever had in his life – or has had since: ‘Marie José treated me like the son she had never managed to have. She kissed me and caressed me, and I called her mother. Every weekend she gave me a one hundred franc note and I travelled all over Paris. You can imagine how I felt to be living in this house in Paris after the camps; there were soft pillows, sheets and blankets on my bed.’
The liberation of Paris in August 1944 was a heady experience. Nevrov remembers the British and American soldiers handing out whisky in tea mugs, and the streets full of people of every nationality celebrating.
A Soviet assembly point was set up in Paris for the thousands of Soviet citizens who wished to be repatriated. Georgi Kondakov worked there and came into contact with many of the survivors of Alderney, including Nevrov, whom he hadn’t seen for two years. These were intensely happy days; the taste of freedom was intoxicating. Kondakov had no money, but he walked all over Paris seeing the sights, visiting cinemas and museums, his eyes wide with wonder at his first experience of a capital city.
But the two Russians were homesick, and as soon as the war was over they made preparations to go home. Nevrov’s adopted parents were heartbroken; they had become deeply attached to this kind boy with wavy blond hair and full lips, and they had procured for him a Swiss passport and a new identity, as Robin Pierre. But Nevrov would not be dissuaded. He and Kondakov were flown by American plane to Leipzig, then taken by truck to Torgau in eastern Germany, on the border of the Soviet zone of occupation. Kondakov:
There was a brass band to greet us at the border. It was comical, its members were shabby and poorly dressed. There was an ancient castle there and I remember they were throwing the old books out of the windows and ripping them up to make beds. I had in my hands a book printed in 1578.
We then had to march to Elsterwerda. It was a long way and the whole route was scattered with clothing people had discarded. Kirill had three suits and twelve ties, but he threw all of them away because we were so tired and we were told we were going to have to walk all the way to the Soviet border. A lot of people were being robbed by soldiers from the Red Army anyway. We walked for three or four days.
At Elstewerda our documents, photos and certificates stating that we had fought in the French resistance were taken away from us by the Soviet authorities. They were kept in the KGB archives until 1986. We walked on to Görlitz on the German-Polish border [about seventy-five miles]. We formed part of a column of 13,500 people, most of whom were women, children and old men. My friends and I were given arms to protect the column from bandits. There was a column ahead of us of about the same size which was attacked by robbers and many people were killed.
We were taken across Poland by lorries and arrived in Ukraine near Lvov. From there we found a train to Bryansk which took us very slowly back to Orel.
Orel had been reduced to rubble. I was walking back to my village when I bumped into two women I knew; they told me my brother had been killed, my home burnt and my father was dying. I sat down and wept.
Kondakov reached his village late at night and fell asleep in a neighbour’s shelter. In the morning his mother found him asleep. At the memory, Kondakov’s hands trembled and he tried to laugh, but he was crying: ‘My family were living in a makeshift shelter – a hole in the ground – and my father was dying. He had fallen ill on the front in the marshes of Belorussia and had been in hospital. A week after my return he died, and I tried to find the wood to make a coffin to bury him in. I had to beg for the nails.’
Both Kondakov and Nevrov had to register with the KGB immediately on their return. As ‘repatriates’ they were under suspicion of having volunteered to work for the Germans. Kondakov: ‘I registered with the KGB the day after my return. The KGB mayor of my district accused me of collaborating with the Germans. I had one certificate left proving I had fought in the French Resistance. I had to go back to this mayor every day for questioning. I didn’t go the day my father died, and for this I got into trouble and was refused permission to join the kolkhoz. I was given no documents to prove my identity, so it was hard to get work.’
Kondakov moved from place to place looking for a job. Eventually he returned to western Ukraine, tempted to escape to the West. He was accused of stealing and was sentenced to four and half years in a Stalinist concentration camp, building railways in Siberia. ‘It was almost as bad as Alderney,’ he says. ‘There was more food, but I had to deal with the Arctic cold.’
Settling back into Orel was little easier for Kirill Nevrov:
After the life I had had in Paris, Orel was hell; everything had been destroyed by the war. For eighteen months, I would burst into tears every night and soak my pillow with crying. For the first few months after my return I was questioned by the KGB, and they asked for all the names of the people I had met in France. At first, Kondakov and I were planning to go back to Paris, but then I got a job and I stopped thinking about France. Initially they didn’t trust me at the plant where I worked, but I worked hard and proved myself.
Ivan Kalganov was with Kondakov in the French resistance and in Paris. He followed the same route back to Ukraine as Nevrov and Kondakov, marvelling at the shabby military band in Torgau and losing his documents in Elstewerda. But once back on Soviet territory, he was unlucky enough to be chosen for a labour battalion:
We were taken to the Donbass coal region of the Ukraine to work as miners. I don’t remember how long I worked there. I wanted to see my family because I had heard nothing from them for several years, so in 1946 I escaped and found my way home. No one in my family thought I was still alive; I found my mother chopping wood outside our home. I said ‘Good morning’ to her and she replied ‘Good morning,’ but carried on working; she didn’t recognise me. My sisters travelled from where they were working to see me. Then a policeman came and took me away again, just like the Germans had done. I was sentenced to six years in prison according to Stalin’s order of 1941 which forbade anyone to leave mines or plants voluntarily. I ended up serving two years in prisons in Rostov and in the mines in the Donbass. But at least we had enough bread to eat.
Another Alderney survivor, Alexander Rodine, heard in Germany that he was likely to be sent with a consignment to Kirov, Siberia, to cut wood:
Some of us decided to escape. We managed to get all the way back to Orel from Germany via Kiev in Ukraine. We got into old oil barrels which had been loaded onto cargo trains. It took about three months and we only had the food and drink which local people gave us.
What was my family’s reaction? I’m going to cry. When I at last reached my home, I was so tired that I fell asleep in front of my home – all the villages had been burnt so people were living underground in holes dug with their own hands. My mother found me and woke me up; she had given up hope that I was still alive. I can’t find the words to describe her reaction.
There was a pause, then he resumed his story:
When I arrived back from Germany, right up until the death of Stalin I had to go virtually every day to the KGB. Even at night, people would come to question me. They were looking for an enemy of the nation in my face.
All the former slave labourers faced the same kind of suspicion on their return home. At each checkpoint, in Paris, Germany and on the Soviet border, the Soviet authorities questioned them in order to establish whether they were prisoners of war, or whether they had been collaborators and volunteered to work for the Germans. Both were crimes for which the punishment was severe – death or labour camps. Stalin had decreed that members of the Red Army could never surrender, but should use their last bullet on themselves if necessary; no soldier had any justification for being taken as a prisoner of war.
The Alderney survivors who are still alive today were too young to be eligible for conscription in 1941, and could thus prove that they had not surrendered. But they could never prove that they had not volunteered to work for the Germans. They were stigmatised as ‘repatriates’, and their war record has dogged them all their lives. Official forms such as applications for jobs, flats, benefits, even consumer goods like telephones and fridges, required information about the applicant’s war service. Being a ‘repatriate’ ensured that the Alderney survivors never had access to education or training, and were not promoted in their work. Cities such as Moscow and Kiev were ‘closed’ to repatriates, who were not entitled to the better pensions, medical care, free transport and immense respect awarded to ‘war participants’ in the Soviet system.
In 1946 I arrived back in Orel. I had been questioned in Paris, and again in Germany at the checking point, and then by the KGB when I got home. They were looking for prisoners of war to put on trial. I had been with Georgi [Kondakov] in the French resistance until the liberation of France, but when I said on the forms that I had been in France during the war, no one believed me. They thought I had been in Germany. There was no chance of advancing in my career. I could only work as an unqualified worker, and I was a cinema projectionist all my life.
The Alderney survivors could not clear their reputations. No one believed their stories, so they stopped telling people what they had experienced. Even their own families were ashamed of them.
Albert Pothugine was fourteen when he was handed over to the Germans by collaborating Russian police in 1942. The injustice of his hard life fills him with anger. He rose to his feet and the tears streamed down his face as he spoke:
You can tell people that we were not volunteers. We have been considered second-rate all our lives for having worked for the Germans. Damn them! Why didn’t they protect me? Why did they let me go to Germany? Sometimes I look at fourteen-year-old boys today and I ask myself, how can a boy of that age hold a hammer of thirty-two kilos and work all day with it? When I returned to Russia I was only eighteen years old, and I was already judged a second-class citizen for the rest of my life.
It is through the efforts of Georgi Kondakov during Glasnost in the mid-eighties that the Alderney survivors have won some measure of rehabilitation. Kondakov encouraged them to apply to the KGB for the return of the certificates proving that they had fought for the French resistance. Over forty years after Ivan Kalganov was forced to relinquish this precious document, it was returned to him. It entitles him to free transport, but more importantly, it regained him his family’s respect. He can now tell his story and be believed, and his son Vladimir listens proudly.
fn1 Willi and Hans, with other members of the clearing-up party, were being held on a British ship moored off St Peter Port.
fn2 The JDM gathered significant support, and by the end of the 1940s constitutional reforms had been passed as a result of popular pressure on the islands and the influence of the British government. On both Jersey and Guernsey the number of elected Deputies was increased, strengthening the democratic element of the islands’ ancient constitutions.